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During Reconstruction, anti-miscegenation laws were briefly repealed in the South, but were reinstated after 1877.
Anti-miscegenation laws were repeatedly upheld in court. The most notable case regarding the topic was the U.S. Supreme Court case Pace v. Alabama (1883). Section 4189 of the code of Alabama prohibited whites and blacks from “living with each other in adultery or fornication.” It carried a steeper fine that Section 4184 of the code of Alabama that prohibited “any man and woman” from living together in adultery or fornication. In this case, Tony Pace, a black man, and Mary Cox, a white women, were indicted for violating section 4189 of the code. They claimed that it violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights because the law penalized them more heavily for being an interracial couple . <ref name="Justia"> (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/106/583/case.html).</ref>
Instead, the court ruled that there was no violation. Rather, the punishment was relative to the crime. Interracial fornication was a different, and more severe, crime than fornication; furthermore, it was not a violation of equal protection since the white party and the black party were both penalized equally.
